


even my swag got swagger (HELL YEAH)

by heck_but_an_account_babeyy



Series: rajay foolishness [1]
Category: Far Cry 4
Genre: Fluff, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sharing a Bed, Slice of Life, Trans Ajay Ghale, asexual rabi ray rana, but neither of them know it yet baby!!, i aM MAKING IT A TAG GODDAMMIT, let's fucking GOOOO, nowhere near as cracky as the title suggests, they're in the no homo bros stage of their relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-20
Updated: 2021-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-28 21:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30145833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heck_but_an_account_babeyy/pseuds/heck_but_an_account_babeyy
Summary: Safe. It’s a strange concept, these days. Ajay tastes a little of it every time they sleep in that bed together.In which Ajay has a sleep schedule, Rabi isdefinitelynot gay, and life in Kyrat is going pretty well.
Relationships: Ajay Ghale/Rabi Ray Rana
Series: rajay foolishness [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2218782
Kudos: 3





	even my swag got swagger (HELL YEAH)

**Author's Note:**

> title is from [the swag song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v2KKTXWd10) by jus reign! this bitch is the funniest person On The Planet, [go check](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKeWnmWE8iM) [my boy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OJtDYLdUOY) [out.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q73kY2GLWX0) dude was a vine star AND he sings like an angel? what can i say girl, he majored in swagger 
> 
> tw for the military, mentions of past racism (ajay got called a haji a lot by his comrades; a bruh moment but nothing extreme, so don't worry), mentions of violence, drinking, and smoking cigarettes + weed. ajay also has ptsd nightmares, but it's not graphic in the slightest. all the violence and military shit is in the second paragraph; feel free to skip it bestie! <3

Ajay has a good thing going on, here in Kyrat. As good as shit can be, as a freedom fighter in the midst of a brutal civil war. Trans freedom fighter, bi freedom fighter, shoved back into the closet and springing right out again at a moment’s notice. (At least he passes. Some older Kyrati still remember the daughter of Mohan; he gently corrects them, and their children cluck their tongues and bemoan the elder's failing memory.)

But things could be worse – at least he _can_ tell now, and it’s cute when other people ask. Not like in the military. Fifteen month services of trekking through scorched green valleys, fucking _sandstorms_ pounding and whipping at his face, squatting in dusty clay houses as he shot at kids with rocket launchers. Wrong place, wrong time and that could’ve been him lying dead on the cracked earth. All for his country _(all for crude oil, all for an escape):_ yet mention his ex-boyfriend and he'd be back moping around the streets of Fall's End.  
He didn’t spare it a thought, though, tripping balls on adrenaline and power. Big skies and dry air and showering in the corner with his back turned to the other guys. He doesn't miss his station, and he sure as shit doesn't miss his comrades (they kept calling him a fucking haji because he was the only brown guy in the squad; he could at least _pretend_ it was amusing the first time, but it sucked the will to live out of his bones by the third) – hell, he doesn’t even miss the fighting. Ajay yearns for the feeling.

He was invincible, back then. 

But Kyrat isn’t so bad.

No, he… he gets more sleep here than he ever did in America, which is- wow, what the fuck. Eats better, too; gundruk and huggi and tsampa dumplings made with hot butter tea, like his mom used to make. There’s stacks of soft roti in his backpack that he tears into with his teeth between fights; rice with tarkari and chhurpi cheese, soft and tangy and perfect; halwa and steaming thukpa with vegetables every colour of the rainbow; yeasty mugs of tongba around the campfire. Good and wholesome Kyrati food. Hasn't eaten like this since he was a little kid. 

He gets up at a good time, a time when the air is startlingly clear, the hills endless, and warmth is yet to lay its kind hands on the soil – and he finds a quiet spot to drink his green tea, because eating in public makes him jittery. There’s a huge slab of rock that sits just behind Banapur, green bushes swaying snugly by its feet. Ajay likes to sit there, where he can see the mossy roofs, the cobbled streets, the sunshine white as snow and three times as bright stretching its slender fingers over the mountains. Like Kyra herself, he thinks, and smiles. The sight brings him peace. He sips his tea (black and floral, the kind mom always drank) and idly watches the locals do the same beneath him. 

Nights are content. He drinks with Sabal (anything that gets him to sleep, really, but Sabal's always preferred hefty jugs of some uncle's raksi); Ajay watches as he takes deep drags from his cigarettes. Royal Army shit, cheap and bitter, but Sabal never complains when Ajay hands him a pack taken from a soldier's corpse. Smoke tendrils curl around his scarred jaw, eyes half-lidded. It feels _secret._ Holy, somehow. He breathes in, out, with leisurely reverence. Sabal always offers him a try; he denies every time. Mom would kill him.  
Later, he’ll come home to stash away the valuable things he found – he has a little room in Banapur now, which he shares with Amita and Bhadra (“You’re the only man I can trust,” she told him, and he didn’t know if she meant around Bhadra or alone with her), and he keeps his sapphires and gold dust there – before he falls asleep with a warm buzz and a peaceful mind.

Sometimes, though – sometimes the sun is already sinking, the sky clouding over with traitorous dusky blue before he expected it to, and Banapur’s ten kilometres away already. Sometimes, he ends up at Rabi’s studio. The sunshine back in town is beautiful, of course it is– but Ajay thinks there’s nothing in the world brighter than Rabi’s grin. 

So they hug (always tight, ridiculously tight, like he imagines lovers would with tearful eyes before one of them departs for war), and Rabi spins his sunglasses around his finger as they chat and drink. The chhaang’s good, the conversation better – he feels like a dumb, happy teenager again, falling about laughing at ass jokes because there’s just something about Rabi that makes him _beam_ – and there’s only one bed in the cramped studio, the low, flat, soft Kyrati kind, all red blankets and thin pillows, but Ajay doesn’t mind. Rabi’s hair smells like weed and fresh mornings. _So_ far beyond tipsy, they wrap themselves in the threadbare duvet and lie like that, their foreheads pressed together. Rabi keeps ruining the peace by catching Ajay’s eye and bursting into hysterics (Ajay gets dragged down with him, because how could he not?), but they fall asleep eventually. 

_Safe._ It’s a strange concept, these days. Ajay tastes a little of it every time they sleep in that bed together.

It doesn’t really get dark in Kyrat; the mornings are white and ice-blue, the afternoon is green and yellow and loud, and nights are just… Nights just _are._ Still, calm, cold. The moon makes a dim, pale sort of sun, but it’s enough to see by. When he can’t sleep in Banapur, it’s because of a nightmare. Always. He wakes up with a cry, reaching toward the ceiling for something that’s long gone: soft visions of red and gold and flaking blood fade from his mind.  
So he downs a beer and sprints through the rice terrace, arms swinging and legs hurling like a literal fucking maniac, until he’s barely got the strength in his bones to drag his feet back to the safehouse. If anybody sees him, they don’t mention it the next morning.

***

_He can't decide if it's better or a million times worse to have an episode at Rabi's. The guy has a way of calming him down when he finally jerks awake (less to do with his frantic demeanour and trembling hands, and more about his touch on Ajay's arms, his hushed whisper), but he... doesn't like Rabi seeing him so vulnerable, like that. When it's not his choice. He's meant to be strong, or how can anyone take him seriously?_

_(Rabi has a habit of kissing his hair. But only at night, through bleary eyes and the fog of sleep, when neither of them will remember it come morning.)_

***

“Dude,” Ajay says. Even as he takes a deep drag from his blunt, he can’t drag his eyes away from Rabi’s shoulders – the curve of them, the stain on his neon shirt, the bones jutting under his brown skin. He’s too skinny, but isn’t everyone around here? At least he’s got good, round cheeks, Ajay thinks. He wants to poke them. “No homo, but yellow is totally your colour.”

Rabi chokes on his weed. “Dude,” he wheezes, between hacking up both of his entire lungs – Ajay whacks him on the back, and he huffs out one final cough, staring incredulously at him. “You can’t just say shit like that to a man. I am in a fragile emotional state, okay, and I’ll have you know that I legally can’t say anything gay after,” he checks his bare wrist and almost drops his blunt in the process, somehow, “two am.”

Ajay stares at him. “Signed some contracts that I shouldn't have,” Rabi explains, grinning like an idiot. “Chotu is always getting me into trouble. And besides, you are _way_ too hot. Just ridiculously sexy. I don’t know how you manage to walk around like you’re permanently on Top Model, or how Top Model is even filming in a war zone – cameramen never die, absolutely, but the guy holding a boom mic must be sweating his literal fucking balls off from nerves – but what I’m trying to say is that if you get even a little homo I will die. I will combust. You may not like it, but that’s the truth.”

Ajay grins right back: he cups Rabi’s soft cheek, admires his big brown eyes. Their blunts lie discarded on the floor, abandoned for greener pastures; or for rolling brown mountains christened in golden sun, what with Rabi's eyes and his hair (black in the shitty studio lighting, deep dark almost-chocolate in the sunlight) and his sunny, incredible _everything._ He’s so cute. Why is he so cute? 

“What if I kissed you?” Ajay asks. Rabi wraps his arms around his shoulders. They’re close, now; smoke lingers in the air between them, on their clothes, on their lips.

“What if I kissed _you?”_ Rabi threatens. Ajay bursts out laughing. 

Later, they end up tangled together on the couch, legs sticking up and hands in faces and even though the bed is right there, barely a metre away in the tiny studio, this is more comfortable. Somehow. 

“What’d you mean, when you said you were in a fragile mental state?” Ajay murmurs, mouth squished somewhere between Rabi’s chest and navel.

“It,” and he ruffles what he _hopes_ is Ajay’s hair, “is shitting traumatising to be woken up balls-deep in the night by your best friend flailing and screaming like he’s being murdered.”

“I’m your best friend?” Ajay asks– then, “Balls-deep in the night, what the _fuck,_ man,” he groans, and Rabi cackles.

It’s a good night, like a really good night; Rabi hasn’t slept so well in years. In ever, maybe. He falls asleep with affection fluttering behind his ribs and a warm glow in his heart.


End file.
